


There's a Balm

by spinalimmobilization (gilead)



Series: Meet Me There [1]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-23
Updated: 2015-04-23
Packaged: 2018-03-25 09:49:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3805993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gilead/pseuds/spinalimmobilization
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Clarke leaves all that she knows, and borrows enough courage to let it all catch back up to her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	There's a Balm

Clarke starts somewhere familiar, somewhere safe: London. All too soon, it begins to remind her of home. But she wanders too close to the destruction in Beirut, and triggers another set of memories she's trying to banish. From there, she bypasses the continent for Hong Kong's magnificent skyline, but it's stiflingly hot and claustrophobic. In Thailand, she lives on a farm and loses ten pounds she can't afford to part with. She crosses the ocean to Hawai'i, closer to home than when she started, but she's unspeakably tired, and finds lodging in a privately owned villa near Lana'i City.

There's no one around her as far as the eye can see, no signs of civilization, and she spends her first few days hiking restlessly for miles—whether searching or fleeing she isn't sure—and when the sun becomes unbearable, she escapes to the cool hardwood floors of her temporary-for-an-unspecified-time residence and watches documentaries about people and places she doesn't know and won't remember.

Eventually, she has to drive back into the city—population three thousand and change—for groceries. There are no traffic lights on the entire island, and off-road vehicles are mandatory for any destination outside of the hub. She's never lived like this.

In the open-air market, she hoards four bottles of sunscreen, stocks up on five different types of fish, and is selecting fresh fruit when an avocado rolls out of the pellet and into another shopper's feet.

“I'm sorry,” she apologizes automatically, but she hasn't spoken in about two weeks and it comes out irreparably hoarse and barely audible.

The stranger, avocado already in hand, pauses very briefly from her rise from a crouch, but it's noticeable enough. Clarke looks up, hand halfway out, and is met with wide green eyes set against a tanned, sharp face and a jumble of sun-bleached curls.

She's beautiful, and Clarke hasn't seen a single person for some time.

Something rough touches her hand, and Clarke looks back down to see the stranger is holding the avocado to her slack fingers.

“Are you okay?” She asks, low and soft, as if someone is eavesdropping.

Clarke clears her throat and responds in the affirmative, slightly louder and more coherent. “Yeah. Thank you.”

The woman straightens to ramrod proportions, nods once, and about-faces to the butcher's block. The back of her shirt advertises a surfing school, the logo faded to barely decipherable and unassisted by a trail of small holes.

Clarke decides she's had a full day, and escapes back to the villa. A week later, amidst an unbearably hot midday lull, she looks up the name of the surfing school in a directory book purchased from the airport. It's just west of town, and she decides to indulge whatever it is she seems to be feeling. It's an easy decision, after all, because she has nothing to lose. She leaves the same day.

The two-storey is stark on an empty stretch of beach, a single sign visible from the road announcing it to be a place of business. It's flush against the ocean, partly supported on stilts, and Clarke pulls over on the side of the road behind two similarly dusty vehicles. 

Up close, she discerns that it's more or less a shack of some age, but its workmanship is appreciable even to a layman such as herself. The door is unlocked, and she steps into a open-plan ground floor awash with natural light and surfboards in every variation of colour. The room is clearly a product of good taste with complimentary textiles and wood accents, but as she takes it all in with a more care, she comes to realize that any personal touches are absent.

The door bangs open behind her, and she backs away, jolted. The stranger from the market meets Clarke's gaze placidly, dwarfed by the surfboards she carries one under each arm. She's clad in a plain black two-piece, long, lean, and muscled, inviting the eye with irresistible force.

There's a sizable scar on her chest, and Clarke recognizes it for what it is immediately. She's very careful not to look directly at it again.

“Be with you in a moment,” the woman says, and passes Clarke to rack up the surfboards, trailing the tang of salt and droplets of water in her wake.

Burdens relieved, she retrieves a beach towel from behind the counter and tucks it around herself, beckoning to Clarke with a tilt of of her head. “Have you surfed before?”

“Not at all,” Clarke divulges.

“How would you rate your athletic ability?”

“Below average.”

The woman's lips twitch, and Clarke turns to follow her as she abandons the counter for a wall of assorted foam boards.

“It's a match.” She makes a sky blue selection and offers it for Clarke to take.

The board, although of little significant weight, stands more than two feet above Clarke's head, and she accepts it doubtfully. “If you're sure.”

“Reasonably.”

“Don't these sort of undertakings usually have a liability form? Maybe an introductory monologue?” Clarke asks hopefully.

“My name is Lexa,” Clarke's newest surfing instructor replies, rather succinctly. 

“I'm Clarke.” She's beginning to feel slightly flustered, and afraid that she will appear completely transparent in front of this woman. “How much will I owe you?”

“I will make an assessment when I'm teaching you.”

Clarke reads between the lines: the fee will be proportional to how willing Lexa is to retain her as a student after their first session. “This really is worlds apart from Waikiki, isn't it?” Clarke breathes out on a chuckle, mostly to herself.

“We don't host typical tourists. Only a certain type would consider somewhere as remote as Lana'i.”

“A type like what? My type?”

Lexa glances over calmly. “Those that would exile themselves.”

Clarke bristles a little at the assumption, but it rings true in her answering silence. Instead, she points at her board, at the first word inscribed in the school's logo: Lani Surfing School. “Is this misspelled?”

Lexa's eyelids lower to half-mast and she merely stares at Clarke for several seconds before speaking very precisely. “Please, Clarke.”

Clarke can't help but laugh. She's beginning to feel out Lexa's sense of humour, which is dryer than it has any right to be, but is nevertheless charming in its own way. “Does it mean something without the 'a'?”

“It is the word for heaven in the Hawai'ian language, and sometimes, sky.” Lexa pauses, running her fingers over the logo. “It is also the name of the woman who left all this to me.”

Clarke makes contact with the back of Lexa's hand briefly. “Sounds like she was quite a woman.”

“Quite,” Lexa admits, allowing the touch, then retracting to equip herself with a foamie of her own. “Shall we?”

“Oh, now?” Clarke looks down at her attire. She's wearing a bikini underneath—standard fare after her first week on the island, but it all just feels so quick, so unexpected. “That's fine,” she adds, before Lexa can interject, tiring of her own hesitance.

The waves are gentle with them that day, and Lexa teaches her to how to position and balance herself while paddling, how to get a feeling for the push and pull of the ocean. Clarke learns quickly, though she is sure it's less attributable to her own ability than to Lexa's patient and articulate instruction.

They are beginning to attempt sitting up on the board when a loud bang from the road disrupts Clarke's concentration, and she tumbles off mid-ascent, unprepared and inhaling a mouthful of seawater that she surfaces hacking up. Suddenly, inexplicably weak, she clings to her slick foamie, unable to speak.

“A car backfired passing us.” Lexa paddles in next to her, an arm circling Clarke's waist and taking some of her weight. “It's okay. You're in good company.”

Clarke knows exactly what she means, and allows herself to examine the scar on Lexa's chest openly. It's slightly left of centre, a ragged circle bisected by a long, neat surgical incision. Whoever operated on Lexa did tidy work, and Clarke is no layman on a matter such as this.

“I know,” she says, breathing deeply like she has been to taught to, willing herself to calm, to not further humiliate herself in front of Lexa.

“I know you thought me presumptuous earlier when I talked about exile,” Lexa begins, after a careful study of Clarke. “But this is mine. After this, they told me my heart couldn't stand up to the demands of combat. Apparently, it couldn't tolerate life in the city either.”

The revelation absorbs Clarke's attention completely. “You didn't come here by choice?”

“I don't know if it was my heart condition they had doubts about, or this.” Lexa taps her temple. “It doesn't matter now.”

“The truth doesn't matter?”

“Whose truth?” Lexa doesn't wait for an answer. “It is what it is. I have the life that I have now.”

“And what do I have?” It slips out before Clarke can untangle her thoughts.

“What do you want?”

Clarke forces a grim smile. “To learn how to surf.”

She shifts forward, and Lexa removes her arm, allowing her to float away. They've drifted back towards the shore, and the water is almost entirely calm around them at this depth. Clarke swings up and straddles her board shakily. Next to her, Lexa does the same with a generous helping of poise.

“Do you know what triage is?” Clarke snaps her mouth shut immediately, realizing who she might be asking.

To her credit, Lexa takes it the way Clarke meant it—an invitation to hear a story she gave up her home to never tell again. “The process of assigning priority to victims in a multi-casualty incident.”

“Precisely. But what most people don't know—have a hard time accepting—is that we don't treat those that might be the most critical first. The first responder has to decide who would have the highest chance of survival with the time to backup, manpower, and supplies at hand. Someone with catastrophic injuries could be resuscitated, maybe eventually, with CPR, with assisted ventilations, but it's all a preventative measure until arrival at a hospital. It means a set of hands will be held up on this patient until backup arrives. A set of hands that could be used to stabilize other patients who won't need constant care.”

She remembers telling Jasper to leave Maya to help her, the sound of his rage and his grief, and Lexa's knee brushes against hers.

“I went on a camping trip, and we were on our way back in a coach. A tanker truck was behind us. We were hours out on the highway. I was the only medical professional there, which meant I had incident command until someone could relieve me. There was no one else.”

She remembers Bellamy asking where she would go, the blood on their hands, under her fingernails. Lexa's holding onto her board now, keeping her from drifting away, keeping them anchored.

“The trucker said he was just trying to a make a deadline. The tank had a leak because he wasn't doing the proper checks. And then he just—he just fell asleep at the wheel. He was the first person I treated.”

“Do you wish he wasn't?”

“I wanted to kill him. I wanted to march up to his bed in the hospital and kill him. I could have done it. It took me a minute to come up with ten different ways. I worked there. No one would know.”

Lexa shakes her head vigorously. “You wouldn't have felt better.”

“I don't feel better now.”

“You won't for a long time.”

Clarke snorts. “Thanks, that's great.”

“But you have time,” Lexa insists.

“Time to do what? I've tried a lot, believe me.”

“Surf.” 

Lexa lets go of Clarke's board and paddles towards the horizon, smooth and sleek. The wave she catches isn't terribly impressive, but Lexa rides it like she was born to it, staying ahead of the whitewater until the very end. She stays there, stark against the blue backdrop, until she flops back with a spectacular splash and backstrokes to Clarke.

“What do you say?” Lexa prompts, not sounding out of breath in the least. 

“I'll consider it.”

“Think fast. Your shoulders thank you kindly.”

Clarke confirms the skin of her shoulders as pink and tender, but Lexa's paddling back out when she raises her head. Lexa cuts across wave after wave, freer than Clarke has ever seen, and doesn't wipe out once. She's turning out the darkness, Clarke thinks, somehow.

She presses her chest to the board, nose low to the water like Lexa's taught her, hands cupped to increase the pull on her crawl stroke. Ahead of her, Lexa's stopped to watch, to wait for her.

Clarke has a lot to learn, but she has time.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope to begin a bit of more light-hearted fare (mostly)—a series of one-shots with shamelessly low standards based on first meetings because I'm irreparably sad about this pairing. Happy and hopeful endings promised. If you have a prompt, leave it for me. I promise to consider it!


End file.
